How strange it is to wake up, check the news, see the world burning down… and still have to go to work, answer texts, be a person. Do what you can. That’s enough. It really is.
The world is always burning somewhere. You just happen to be in an era when you have dozens of media companies making big money on broadcasting it to the world at large. Almost none of it matters to you and is just mental dead weight, something that neither affects, nor can be affected by you.
[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented…It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
-- C. S. Lewis
"Oh, you know the sort of thing if you read the papers a lot," said Ponder. "I seriously think they think that it's their job to calm people down by first of all explaining why they should be overexcited and very worried." "Oh, I know they do that," said Glenda. "How would people get worried if they weren't told how to be?"
-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
"My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
-- Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility
“What an age! Every one is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don’t know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end.”
-- George Sand to Gustave Flaubert, 1870
Insist on believing that good will prevail; that the work will get done; that there will again be love. We have to want to get up in the morning for the good mornings to arrive.
-- Tennessee Williams, in Follies of God
